The Army has been creating an island since 1998 on the Northeast coast of the United States. Slowly, the US Army Corps of Engineers built dikes to establish its perimeter. They spent more than a decade filling them with mud.

Its name: Poplar island. It seems like a perfect place for a mystery movie with secret labs and mutants.

The images for this time-lapse were taken by a Landsat satellite, which is managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. They show how the Army started to build the dikes in 1998. The dikes have a sand core covered with stone and armor stone.

Fortunately, no weird stuff is going on there (that we know of, anyway). Poplar Island, which is being rebuilt in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, is 30 miles south of Baltimore Harbor, where all the mud is coming from. Right now, the island is a wildlife sanctuary, home of 170 species of birds "including terns and bald eagles" as well as hundreds of diamondback terrapins. [US Army and Flickr]